Literature is a technology like any other. And the writers we revere—from Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, and others—each made a unique technical breakthrough that can be viewed as both a narrative and neuroscientific advancement. Literature’s great invention was to address problems we could not solve: not how to start a fire or build a boat, but how to live and love; how to maintain courage in the face of death; how to account for the fact that we exist at all.

Why be more creative? Because creativity is the human brain’s power to adapt to fast-changing, life-and-death environments, overcoming emergent challenges and leveraging emergent opportunities. It’s what enabled our species to thrive in the chaotic and uncertain ecosystems of evolution by natural selection. It makes us antifragile in situations where computer AI turns brittle, and it will allow you to outcompete and win in volatile, unstable domains.

Written for the US Army, applicable to all.

Every time we think ahead, we are crafting a story. Every daily plan—and every political vision, social movement, scientific hypothesis, business proposal, and technological breakthrough—starts with “what if?” So why do we keep overlooking story’s importance to intelligence in favor of logic?

Revealing the significance of storythinking from science to business to philosophy, this book also provides ways for readers to harness its power to script better tomorrows.

We outline a narrative theory of creativity training; illustrate with examples of training and assessment from our ongoing work with the U.S. Department of Defense, Fortune 50 companies, and graduate and professional schools; and explain how the theory can help fill prominent lacunae and gaps in existing creativity research, including the creativity of children, the psychological mechanisms of scientific and technological innovation, and the failure of computer artificial intelligence to replicate human creativity.

Our research arm’s article in The Journal of Creativity, describing how the same narrative trainined we developed with US Special Operations boosts self-efficacy and resilience in elementary students

Your environment is changing fast. You lack the data to make confident decisions. Your operations sprawl with processes. You’re spotting trends that could be good — or not.

These are the four challenges of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. They’re the reality of business today. But they’re not new. They’re intrinsic to markets, sales, manufacturing — and life in general. So why do some organizations respond better? How do they succeed when others struggle or even surrender?

Organizations today spend great sums of money on creativity training, hoping that it will spur innovative and entrepreneurial thinking among the ranks. Unfortunately, most of this training just doesn’t work. Why not? Because it puts too much faith in the powers of “divergent thinking,” or the random generation of new ideas — a process most of us today call brainstorming. A better approach, the author argues, is to stop relying on the overrated power of randomness in fostering creativity, and instead to adopt a more method-driven approach. In this article, he describes three new training techniques, which, as he puts it, overturn the “most common creativity practices employed by modern businesses.”

In the decades since the Army created the After Action Review (AAR), businesses have embraced the practice as a way of learning from both failure and success. But all too often the practice gets reduced to nothing more than a pro forma exercise. The authors of this article describe the history and philosophy of the original AAR, debunk three myths about the practice that impede its proper use, and finally suggest three improvements that can help business leaders make the most of it.